(Photo: AP/Teresa Crawford) Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on January 24, 2017 W hen the mayors of Mexico City, Ciudad Juarez, and Guadalajara recently traveled to the United States to discuss the fallout from the Trump administration’s immigration policies, they did not go to Washington to speak with White House officials or members of Congress. Instead, they headed to Chicago to meet with Mayor Rahm Emanuel to discuss what the four cities could do to assist families, individuals, and businesses confronting the swift policy shift. Chicago is just one of many U.S. cities, including New York, Los Angeles, and smaller regional hubs like Austin, Houston, Boston, Miami, and San Francisco, that cultivate and maintain global relationships. Such cities all have their distinctive, economic, political, and social niches in the United States. But they also have their own distinctive leverage in international affairs, courtesy of links that imbue city leaders with unprecedented influence at a time...

AP Photo/David Goldman Military veterans and Native American tribal elders come to a stop for a ceremonial prayer during a march to a closed bridge across from the Dakota Access oil pipeline site in Cannon Ball, North Dakota, Monday, December 5, 2016. D onald Trump hung a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office on the same day that he signed an executive order to expedite construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The chilling symbolism of giving pride of place to the man who presided over the Cherokees’ expulsion from their Eastern lands in one of the largest forced migrations of America’s indigenous people was hard to miss. The Army Corps of Engineers followed up on the order by granting an easement to the Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the pipeline project, to complete the last segment of the $3.8 billion, nearly 1,200-mile underground project. The construction gets back on track just as protests spread nationwide from the North Dakota homelands of the Standing...

AP Photo/Nick Ut Los Angeles residents vote at Kenter Canyon Elementary School on November 8, 2016. P resident Donald Trump’s inflammatory immigration executive order promises to command headlines for the foreseeable future. But he appears to have backed away, at least for the moment , from issuing a directive to launch a federal investigation into voter fraud, a national scandal in his own mind if not in reality. It is unclear whether Trump plans to wait for attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions to officially arrive on the scene or for a more fortuitous time to inject additional mayhem into what was a frayed but functioning system of government before he took office. Trump apparently believes in voter fraud, but voter fraud in the United States is all but nonexistent. Loyola Law Professor Justin Levitt’s survey of federal elections from 2000 through 2012 uncovered 31 alleged (not confirmed) instances of voter impersonation out of more than one billion votes cast. Affronted by the...

(Photo: Ian Freimuth/Flickr) Chicago I n his inaugural address, President Donald Trump returned to his familiar urban script. American-style carnage mires mothers and children (fathers were left out of the equation) in poverty and in crime-, drug-, and gang-infested inner cities. On Tuesday, Trump tweeted at Chicago, his designated urban-carnage center, declaring he would send in “the Feds” unless Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who also happens to have been President Obama’s first chief of staff, and other city officials figured out how to quell gun violence. It is a fact that Chicago has had the highest number of murders in the country over the past five years. However, there are more than a dozen cities, including Miami, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., that have higher per capita homicide rates . Most municipal leaders understand that crime reduction hinges on addressing multiple underlying economic factors like poverty , which requires dollars and innovative strategies, not beatdowns...

AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta Representative Katherine Clark, left, accompanied by Representative Elijah Cummings, right, speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, January 12, 2017, to discuss President-elect Donald Trump's conflicts of interest and ethical issues. M assachusetts Congresswoman Katherine Clark was the first woman and second member of the U.S. House of Representatives to announce that she would not attend the swearing in of the 45th president of United States. (Luis Gutierrez of Chicago was the first House member to say he wouldn’t go.) Clark says she did not want to participate in what she believed was the “normalization” of a man who revels in pitting groups of Americans against each other. Trump’s attack on John Lewis only solidified her decision. Lewis is one of Clark’s most esteemed colleagues, and she has documented this 21st century Lewis-and-Clark partnership on social media: She has posted photos of herself with Lewis visiting...